After Indiana lawmakers failed to enact a school choice program,
insurance executive J. Patrick Rooney set up his own choice program to
help Indianapolis schoolchildren afford a private education. It's
all part of Rooney's guest to live up to his company's name,
Golden Rule.

The name of J. Patrick Rooney's company couldn't be more
fitting.

Rooney, chairman of Golden Rule Insurance Co. in Indianapolis, spends
his days trying to live up to the biblical creed: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." He has a vision of a world
free of racial barriers and discrimination, a world where children of
all backgrounds can get the education they need to prosper, a world
where fairness and equality prevail--in personal lives as well as in
business dealings. But unlike many idealists, Rooney is both a dreamer
and a doer.

As a dreamer of educational excellence, he became a doer by setting
up a tuition fund to help low-income Indianapolis families send their
children to private schools. As a dreamer of racial harmony and
integration, he became a doer by joining a predominantly black church.
As a dreamer of business fairness, he became a doer by taking state
insurance departments to court to get them to treat all insurance
companies equally.

"I'm old enough to remember that when you got on the train
in Chicago and were going south, there would be certain cars marked
'colored people' and other cars for white people; they would
be separate, and the fact is, it wasn't equal. Today, our society
has progressed. We have decided that today, we should have equal
treatment for all of the children of God, whether they're white
children or black children or Hispanic children.

"The same thing applies to insurance, by gosh," adds
Rooney, son of the founder of Golden Rule, which with premium income of
more than $400 million is the nation's largest writer of individual
major-medical insurance. "We ought to have standards, the standards
ought to be published, and they ought to apply the same to everybody. We
have taken one insurance department after the other to court on this
subject, and we have won every time. We're in the business of
teaching them about due process of law."

Most recently, Rooney and Golden Rule have been in the spotlight for
getting into the business of education reform. Like many Americans,
Rooney is frustrated that school reforms undertaken in recent years
haven't borne much fruit. School choice is an approach that Rooney
thinks might make all the difference. The theory is that if schools must
compete for enrollment, they will be forced to improve.

School choice is gaining momentum, but not quickly enough for Rooney.
When the Indiana General Assembly failed to enact a choice program,
Rooney went into action with his own. Known as the Choice Charitable
Trust, it offers to pay half the cost of private-school tuition--up to a
maximum of $800 per student per year--for qualifying families within the
Indianapolis Public Schools district. Golden Rule has pledged at least
three years of support--at a total cost of $1.2 million--though a
company publication adds that Choice will continue "as long as the
company continues to prosper."

Rooney says it's imperative for the quality of education to
improve now, because it's getting harder and harder to get by in
the adult world without good reading and mathematics skills.
"We're going to harvest the crop, whether we like it or
not," he says. "The young people that are not getting educated
are going to grow up and want jobs, and want to play a role in our
society besides crime. But the jobs are getting more difficult, not less
difficult. They're getting more intellectually demanding, not less
intellectually demanding."

And all of society eventually bears the cost of poor education, he
adds. "If we don't want to pay for the welfare and if we
don't want to pay for the crime, then we damn well better give them
the rudimentary skills with which they can perform a job function. And
that means the ability to read and the ability to do some
mathematics."

Among those who are benefitting, the response has been enthusiastic.
Within days of the program's launch, more than a thousand parents
quickly snapped up applications for the 500 scholarships Golden Rule
offered. Eli Lilly & Co. and other area businesses put up additional
money to make funds available to another couple hundred students.

The Wall Street Journal lauds Rooney's plan as "a
breakthrough in corporate support for educational choice." The
newspaper's editorial pages suggest that businesses in other cities
follow suit. "It's potentially an opportunity to help create
the kind of work force that so many managers say they're looking
for--well-educated, diverse, motivated." And businesses in other
cities apparently are considering heeding the newspaper's advice,
judging from the inquiries that Rooney's office has fielded.

The Choice program is not without critics, however. The local chapter
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as
well as some other organizations say if Golden Rule wants to improve
education, it should give its money directly to the public school
system.

But, Rooney insists, the aim of the Choice program is not to destroy
public education but to challenge it in a way that it never had been
challenged before. "When all families, no matter how poor, have the
freedom to walk away from bad schools, competition will force the public
schools to improve."

Choice, advocates point out, is nothing new for families that can
afford private-school tuition. And, they add, that may be one reason
public schools often are better in wealthier areas. Patrick J. Keleher
Jr. is president of TEACH America, a national organization that favors
school choice. He says his own child received a fine education in public
schools in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Ill., an affluent community
where many families have the money to choose private education. "We
had the threat of exit," he says, an economic voting power not
present in most school districts, particularly inner-city districts.

Though school choice has yet to pass in the Indiana General Assembly,
it is gaining press as a campaign issue. Both major candidates for mayor
of Indianapolis, for example, back some form of school choice, and
President Bush plans to make choice a major issue in next year's
presidential election. And according to a recent poll conducted for the
Indiana Policy Review Foundation, 81 percent of Hoosiers favor the basic
concept of school choice, while 54 percent back a voucher system that
would use tax dollars to help families pay for private or parochial
education.

What is it that makes education better in some private schools than
in many public schools? That's not an easy question to answer, but
Rooney says the reasons themselves are of secondary importance. "I
don't have to know what the reason is. The evidence is clear that
the private schools do a lot better job, and that is particularly true
for the lowest-income segment of our society."

That said, Rooney offers a few theories about the differences between
private and public education. "The teachers in the church-related
schools are trying to do the work of the Lord, and the work of the Lord
includes providing tender, loving care. They probably do provide a more
caring environment than those same neglected children would find in the
public schools," Rooney says.

"Secondly," he adds, "in the private school they
believe that they are entitled to have discipline in the classroom, and
when they believe they can have discipline, it turns out that the
students believe it, too."

Rooney says expecting respect is not such a far-fetched idea, even in
inner-city schools that have a reputation for violence and anarchy.
"One of the things that's significant in the minority
community, both black and Hispanic, is their parents are really in favor
of respect for authority. The black families know what it is like when
there is chaos and disruption and they have no sympathy for it.
It's the white liberals who tolerate chaos; black people
don't."

Rooney is, perhaps, better qualified to make such statements than the
average white person because he has more black friends and acquaintances
than does the average white person. That is due in part to his choice of
churches: For nine years, Rooney has been one of only a handful of white
members of Holy Angels Church on the near-north side of Indianapolis.

"I was aware of the fact that white people had been willing to
have some integration on their terms. The white church would be glad to
welcome a few black families," he explains. "But I wondered
what it would be like to go as a white person to an all-black church and
have integration on black people's terms, where they're the
dominant voice and white folks are not. I decided that that's
something I could do, have integration for me. I wasn't imposing it
upon anybody else, but it was something I could do to go to the black
community and integrate in their environment."

His church membership has given Rooney a unique insight into the
problems facing black Americans, as well as some of their views on
solutions. "One of the things that I'm really interested in
for blacks is power and self-respect, and by God, they're more
interested in it than I am. What I'm not interested in is having
black people say, 'Thank you Mr. Rooney, thank you Mr.
Rooney.' Rather, I'm interested in helping them so that they
can thank themselves for what they are doing for themselves.

"I'm interested in empowerment, and I know that's what black people want," Rooney says. "They don't want to be
beholden to the white man, they want to do it for themselves, and I want
to help them do it for themselves."

Such are the views that give writers fits as they try to classify
Rooney. He sees himself as a conservative Republican, though concern for
minorities is a trait many liberals claim as their own.

What is predictable about Rooney's views is that they all seem
to stem from a sincere concern for humankind, in areas that include
civil liberties. That's what led him to join the board of the
Indiana Civil Liberties Union. Four years after then-candidate George
Bush derided Michael Dukakis for being a "card-carrying
member" of the allegedly liberal American Civil Liberties Union,
Rooney remains one of the higher-profile conservative ACLU members.

Rooney finds merit in Bush's criticisms, but is unwilling to
throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water. "There are other
Republicans in the Indiana Civil Liberties Union besides me, and each of
us is trying to remind them that their proper role is to be concerned
with civil liberties, not with the agenda of the Democratic Party."
His views have earned the respect of Michael Lee Gradison, executive
director of the ICLU, who has likened Rooney to a "rugged
individualist of earlier days."

In the insurance industry, a description that often precedes
Rooney's name is "maverick." "We have been crusaders
that the insurance regulatory process should be based upon due process
of law. It is a civil liberties issue."

He explains that many state insurance agencies regularly enforce
rules and decide rate cases differently, depending on the company, the
circumstances, or even the mood of the regulator. "Regulation
without legal standards" is how Rooney describes it, and he says it
is driving many large health insurers out of the business of writing
individual health policies. That, he says, is one of the major reasons
there are some 37 million Americans who don't have health coverage.

Rooney points to speed limits as examples of how laws should be
enforced: They are properly adopted and posted, and they are the same
for all motorists driving similar vehicles. "In regard to insurance
regulation, we think the same thing should apply," he says.
"There should be a standard that is properly adopted, and that
generally means by law, or if not by law, then by proper rule. And then
the standard should be published in books that are available to the
regulated parties. And it should apply the same to all companies, not
one standard for us and a different standard for other companies."

Golden Rule has taken insurance departments to court in several
states, including Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa and South Carolina, and
cases are pending in Florida and North Carolina. In once recent case,
Golden Rule filed a grievance against the insurance department in
Florida after the department denied a rate-increase request. A hearing
officer found that Golden Rule's rate request was denied because it
lacked certain information that the state didn't require of other
insurers. The officer called that discrimination against Golden Rule,
and said it showed that the state's insurance rules could be
changed "at the whim of regulatory officials."

Golden Rule's campaign has been successful, and with each
success such as the one in Florida Rooney's rebellion gains more
respect among his insurance colleagues. It's an important fight, he
says, because insurance department decisions can have a significant
impact on a company's profitability. "Whether we're on
the better side or the worse side, we think the same standard should
apply to everyone."

Rooney's fight for fairness continues on the diverse fronts he
has chosen. And whether they agree with his views or not, a growing
number of people around the country seem to be listening to what Rooney
has to say.

COPYRIGHT 1991 Curtis Magazine Group, Inc.
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.